It's funny. I'm on the phone trying to reach a student loan representative right now. I keep pressing 1 for English, 4 for a student loan representative, 1 again for the type of loan, then I'm back to pressing 4 for a loan representative. It's an infinite loop!
I try hitting 0 for an operator but then I'm prompted to give a 4 digit extension for the party I want to reach.
It could be that the pool of operators for your type of loan is empty (i.e. they're all offline or engaged), and the app is set to automatically let you try again with some other department.
Just going with Occam here, but I've seen a couple of callcentre call-routing systems and the potential for misconfiguration is fairly high.
Student loans by themselves are an example of a business anti-pattern in my opinion. Schools and governments should figure out funding models that do not charge the students huge sums of money because it's perfectly possible to organize an education system without that (as many countries demonstrate). It is immoral to drive students into debt.
Or, if you want a more rational reasoning: nowadays higher education is essential to gain access to knowledge worker jobs which are becoming the foundation of the post-industrial economy. Nations should want the best quality of students in those jobs, not just those who can afford the entry ticket. Therefore it makes sense from an economic perspective to amortize the cost of entry (higher education) across the entire taxpayer base and leave education as a purely merit-driven system where the best students get the most economically significant jobs.
Most automated phone systems will connect you to an operator if you press 0 repeatedly (as in 10 to 20 times in a row). There's almost always a way to get around automated phone systems.
Or when you call don't press anything. The system may assume you have an old rotary phone that can't make the correct tones and automatically forward you to a person.
I try hitting 0 for an operator but then I'm prompted to give a 4 digit extension for the party I want to reach.